A Federal Plan to Make It Easier to Report Medical Mistakes

Accountability for preventable mistakes has now been officially recognized as an important part of the effort to make medical care safer for everyone.

The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) is the lead agency in the federal HHS department charged with improving the quality, safety, efficiency and effectiveness of health care. It supports research that helps people make more informed decisions and develops partnerships among different groups to make such improvements happen.

Accountability is part of that effort. To that end, the AHRQ is seeking approval from the Obama administration for a prototype system for patients to report medical mistakes and unsafe practices by health-care providers.

The New York Times described the plan, and said that even hospitals were receptive to the idea, despite some concerns about malpractice liability and possible financial penalties for poor performance.

The Times story referred to research suggesting that 1 in 4 patients experiences adverse events; some were not even recorded in their medical records.

The system proposed by the AHRQ enables patients and their family members to report medical errors and near errors via a Web site and telephone interviews. The information would include:

details of the medical mistake;

the date and location of the adverse event, and whether it resulted in harm;

the type of harm;

contributing factors; and

whether the adverse event was reported and to whom.

The Web and phone questionnaires would ask patients why the mistake might have happened and offer a list of possible reasons. It also would ask for permission to share the adverse event information with health-care providers so they can take steps to improve patient safety.

The information submitted in the reports would be analyzed by researchers from the RAND Corporation and the ECRI Institute, a not-for-profit organization that investigates medical errors.

The feds would like to begin collecting data in May. Questionnaires would be available in hospitals and doctors’ offices. Information about the reporting program would be distributed to pharmacies and mailed to patients’ homes.

If the plan gets the go-ahead, and if patients volunteer to describe their adverse experiences with regularity, an important new data base should contribute mightily to recognizing how mistakes happen, and to a broad-based response to preventing them.

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